Jihad Academy: The Rise of Islamic State

2015.

Introduction

The hills of Raqqa in the Euphrates valley, with their parched, stony gorges, achieved notoriety one fateful morning in August 2014. A video was posted online: the picture faded in to reveal a hostage in an orange jumpsuit and his taunting executioner brandishing a knife. A short harangue, a final provocation, and a last message from the victim to his family. Then one more murder under the Syrian sun.

James Foley’s macabre execution was successful beyond its perpetrators’ dreams. The West was stunned. The summer holidays were over. Obama held a crisis meeting and Cameron cut short his holidays. After three years of waiting, inaction and procrastination, violence suddenly invaded our screens and forced us to react. Islamic State had thrust itself onto the agenda.

Yet we had seen Islamic State coming, since its reasonably amicable split from al-Qaida’s official franchise in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. Islamic State has made relentless advances amid rampaging violence, rifts amid the Syrian opposition to the regime, and growing despair and frustration. Its progress seemed to halt in the spring, as armed groups in Syria engaged in internecine battles, but the deteriorating situation in Iraq gave it fresh momentum. Islamic State took Mosul almost without a shot being fired and established a caliphate. Or rather it restored a caliphate that had existed, uninterrupted, throughout Islamic history until 1924.

It was as if, with the murder in the Syrian desert, we had suddenly become aware of the challenge we faced from Syria, Iraq and the group that calls itself Islamic State.¹ There had already been thousands, even hundreds of thousands of deaths. But this particular death grabbed our attention. It affected us directly. This was no longer Syrians murdering Syrians, it was not just an Arab affair. These were our people. In the midst of the Syrian civil war, an American from New Hampshire had been killed in cold blood by a British national from East London.

For the last three years, in the Syrian crisis alone, the damage has been extensive. Half a million people have been seriously injured. Two hundred thousand are missing, fighters or civilians in detention, subjected to torture, people who may never return. At least a third of homes have been damaged; nearly half of all Syrians have had to leave theirs. As refugees or displaced people, they are crammed into insecure camps. But the psychological damage is even more severe and will be harder to repair. It is difficult to imagine how the different components of Syrian society can be put back together after such an outpouring of hatred and violence.

Iraqi society can take no more upheavals. In thirty-five years, it has experienced a terrible war against Iran, destructive international intervention followed by a criminal regime of sanctions, a further invasion and the horrors of a poorly concluded occupation. When the invader packs his bags, he nearly always leaves crucial issues unresolved.

In 2011, the departure of the last American troops paradoxically initiated a new period of instability, under the leadership of the highly authoritarian and sectarian Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. As a result, in much of Iraq, US occupation was replaced by a much more insidious phenomenon—self-occupation by the country’s own security forces. It was strange to see Iraqi soldiers manning checkpoints on Iraq’s roads and patrolling city streets, looking arrogantly down on the Iraqi population and mimicking the attitude of their US predecessors.

Islamic State’s rise has been made possible by a mix of discrimination, marginalisation and sectarianism. In the West, it has provided an opportunity to youths suffering from an identity crisis who want a way to express their revolt against injustice and society’s contradictions. In Syria and Iraq, it has festered among populations subjected to violence and deprived of hope. The breakdown of these states has created a space in which Islamic State can flourish.

The challenges posed by this crisis are new and require a comprehensive response. A reaction based solely on policing, legal measures and intelligence is doomed to fail. Likewise, a military operation, regardless of the means mobilised, can only spell disaster, since the intervention of ground troops (except for the discreet efforts of special forces) is out of the question, as there is no support for it. When the frustration of a youth from the European suburbs combines with the rage of a Syrian persecuted by his own country’s security forces, it’s easy to understand why public agencies need to work together. Diplomatic efforts must apply pressure to bring about political transition in the states concerned. Humanitarian organisations need to act, because there is no better breeding ground for extremism than entire populations in despair.

It will be no easy task. Competing powers are involved in the crisis in Syria and Iraq, each hoping to strengthen its own position. The Russian-Iranian axis believes its survival is at stake. For the Gulf monarchies, it provides a way of containing the ‘Shia Crescent’ while strengthening the conservative tendencies within the Arab Spring. Turkey, having had to abandon its good-neighbour diplomatic policy, is now trying to suppress Kurdish claims at the same time as containing the jihadist thrust. But Turkey does not understand that the countries in the region don’t look favourably on its neo-Ottoman imperialism. Finally, the West, as so often, views the crisis in terms of security, and has a particular fixation on Israel; it remains entangled in contradictions over the vital issues of human rights and the protection of civilians.

It was in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys that writing, literature, mathematics, law and trade were invented. It was here that the foundations of medicine and philosophy were laid. And here too that humans banded together to tame nature, and so learned to live in society, and invented the foundations of the state and government.

During my months of captivity in Islamic State’s cellars, I often revisited Berlin’s Pergamon Museum in my mind. With my eyes closed, I visualised the Ishtar Gate, fragments of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the tablets and small scrolls on which the most ancient extant traces of writing are inscribed. And the splendid Aleppo Room! I also remembered my visit two years earlier to the Ziggurat of Ur in southern Iraq, and my report from the house of Abraham, clumsily reconstructed by Saddam Hussein. My mind was constantly full of memories of the Sumerian, Hittite, Babylonian and Assyrian cultures, as well as the Abbasid and Umayyad Caliphates, so different in their enlightenment from that of the sinister Ibrahim. What a brutal contrast between the obscene reality I was experiencing and the riches of these civilisations in the pages of our shared history.

But we need to remember what these jihadists have forgotten, what even the leaders in the region who are blithely obliterating their heritage have forgotten: Iraq and Syria are the cradle of our civilisation. Our roots are being destroyed in this conflict, too.

If that world collapses, ours is threatened.

¹ Islamic State (called Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, until June 2014, when it shed any reference to territory) is known by several names. Anglo-American sources generally use the initials ‘IS’, ‘ISIS’ or ‘ISIL’. In France and in the Middle East it is often called by its Arabic acronym Daesh, but when spoken this name has a very pejorative association. Much of the media have decided to add the word ‘group’ to its name, to stress that it is not a real state. I consider that I should use not any other name than the one it uses itself; I’d prefer to focus my critique on its actions and ideology rather than resort to anathema. The term ‘Islamic State’ will be used in this book unless people quoted or interviewed use a different one.

1

Marketing Secularism

The Syrian regime is not secular. Its foundations are built on sectarianism. Its claim to defend minorities is a myth.

For over four decades, Syria has been ruled by an authoritarian regime run by the Ba’ath (‘rebirth’) party, whose motto ‘Unity, freedom, socialism’ initially sounded promising. The Ba’ath movement was founded near the end of the Second World War by a Sunni (Salah ad-Din Bittar), an Alawi (Zaki al-Arsouzi) and a Christian (Michel Aflak); it defined itself as pan-Arab and revolutionary and came into being in a context of decolonisation and debates over Third World non-alignment during the Cold War. Given its declared commitment to economic self-sufficiency, education and women’s emancipation, and resolute opposition to political Islam, it could have set Syria on the path to prosperity for all its citizens.

But none of this took account of Hafez al-Assad’s personality. He was the architect of a coup in 1970. He established a pyramidal leadership structure and system of allegiance: at the top were the president and his family; next, his clan; below them, his community, the Alawis, considered a branch of Shia Islam since colonial days; and, right at the bottom, the rest of the population.

Today, faced with a majority-led insurgency, this regime emphasises its secularism and sets itself up as sole defender of minorities. It trots out this script endlessly, like a commercial slogan. ‘The fall of the Syrian regime would mean the elimination of the region’s minorities,’ one of its apologists, the French-Lebanese MP Nabil Nicolas, insisted on Hezbollah’s TV channel, al-Manar, on 23 May 2011. Bouthaina Shaaban, media adviser to Syria’s president, even tried to sell the idea of a plot against secularism in the Arab world. Maintaining that there were still three secular countries in the region (Sudan, Iraq and Syria), she expressed regret at the division of Sudan into South and North, the invasion of Iraq and ‘aggression’ against Syria. She complained that ‘Western states and their regional allies are seeking to destroy the secular regime in Syria,’¹ a piece of propaganda which struck a chord from the anti-globalisation far left to an extreme right preoccupied with identity issues, de facto creating a repugnant coalition of anti-Semites and Islamophobes. The French Internet site Riposte Laïque, which has close links with the far right, was only too happy to publish the half-baked ideas of Hamdan Ammar, who claimed ‘the Americans want to redraw the geostrategic map of the region at any cost. Having handed Iraq to the Shias, they are now trying to cause Syria to fall into Sunni hands. It’s a dangerous game they’re playing.’²

This promotion of the idea of a Syrian regime that defends its Christians is carefully stage-managed. Any visit from an academic, MP, lobbyist with the potential to involve Syria’s Christian groups is always seized upon and exploited in news reports.

Soon after the Ba’ath party came to power, its relationship with the Sunni majority turned sour. Very quickly, the regime targeted the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the only forces which could claim to constitute any sort of opposition. The Brotherhood was banned in 1964. The army suppressed strikes and demonstrations in the years that followed. But it was the assumption of power by Hafez al-Assad in 1970 and, in particular, the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976, that lit the touch paper. Confrontation escalated: there were terrorist attacks and murders on one side, and arrests and torture on the other. Then, in 1979, a sectarian offshoot of the Brotherhood launched an attack against the Aleppo artillery academy. Eighty-three cadets, all Alawis, were killed. The regime’s revenge was ruthless. A full-scale civil war followed, which was little known in the West since no media were able to cover it. It ended with the crushing of the city of Hama in 1982. Tens of thousands of people were killed. Thousands more were deported to the Palmyra prison in the middle of the eastern desert, which effectively became an extermination camp. This massacre—which sparked little international protest—brought the regime three decades of relative internal peace, at a high price. The regime sent a number of Christian officers to the front line to crush the Hama insurgency. This was a Machiavellian way of sealing a blood pact with the Christian community. The message was clear: if one day the Sunni are in a position to take their revenge, they will avenge themselves on you as much as on us. Your fate now depends on our regime’s survival.

When Bashar al-Assad assumed power after his father’s death in 2000, there were hopes the regime would begin evolving towards greater secularism founded on religious tolerance. Relations with the opposition improved significantly. Many members of the Brotherhood were released from prison and its exiled political leadership in London announced a change in policy, rejecting violence and calling for a modern, democratic state. Simultaneously, the country opened up both politically and economically. Discussion forums sprang up. This period, known as the ‘Damascus Spring’, aroused great hopes. Yet disappointment swiftly followed this precursor of the Arab Spring. The regime soon reverted to its obsession with security and old habits were resumed. Most of the leaders of this political renewal—intellectuals, lawyers and rebel MPs—were arrested and imprisoned. The regime had shown its intrinsic inability to reform.

Ayman